


shadows settle on the place that you left

by hydrospanners



Series: little sun [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Drabble, Family Feels, Gen, N7 month
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-14 17:02:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16496642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: In the wake of her father’s death, Nyria Ryder tries to reconcile the man she knew with the shadow he left hanging over her.





	shadows settle on the place that you left

“Your father was a great man,” they told her. In a hundred different voices, in a thousand different words. They told her to be proud. They told her to be grateful. Alec Ryder was a legend, wasn’t he? An inspiration. A leader. A visionary. He was the sort of man you could believe in; the sort of man you would follow to the depths of hell. She was lucky to have had him as her father. **  
**

 

“You are not your father,” they did  _not_ say. But they didn’t have to, did they? They looked at her with manufactured pity and thinly veiled resentment. They looked at her with fear. They looked at her with a disappointment she knew all too well.

 

“He sacrificed himself for you,” they said, and it sounded like an accusation. “He loved you more than his own life.”

 

She wondered if she was the only person in the universe who had ever really known Alec Ryder.

 

In the quiet of her father’s quarters, she asked herself why. She asked herself what game he was playing. “Even if he did love me,” she reasoned, knowing that he had not, “Alec was a pragmatist. He might sacrifice his life for love, but he wouldn’t sacrifice the Initiative. He wouldn’t sacrifice duty.”

 

“He wouldn’t sacrifice his ambitions,” she did not say, because she was not alone and SAM needed to believe in Alec Ryder as much as the rest of them. Maybe he needed it more. Alec had been his father, and Alec had loved him. Loved him better than he had ever loved his daughter. Maybe more than his son.

 

Nyria remembered what it was to mourn a parent who loved you.

 

“Alec believed in you,” SAM told her. The way he said it almost made it sound true. “He would not have given you the responsibility if he did not think you could bear it, Nyria.”

 

(“Take care of your brother, Solnyshka,” Alec always said. “You’re all he has.”)

 

(He’d been giving her responsibilities she could not bear for as long as she could remember.)

 

SAM, she was reminded, was still a child in every way that really mattered. He knew about experiences, about the theories and hypotheticals of life, but he had never had an experience make a home inside him. Had never gotten tangled in the knotted web of entropy and violence that held the universe together. He knew what it was; he didn’t know it felt. He had never had it happen to  _him_.

 

She decided to be kinder to SAM than the universe had been to her. He was her brother, just as much as Rhys, and she was all he had. She would have to make sure herself was enough.

 

“He believed in us both,” she told him what he needed to hear, even though it wasn’t true. Then she made a promise she could not keep, because she knew he needed that too: “You and me are going to figure this thing out. Just you watch. We’re gonna make Alec proud.”

 


End file.
